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sc94597 on 03 September 2025
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Soundwave said:
sc94597 said:

Raytracing is going through a few more passes on Series S than Switch 2. Switch 2 looks a lot darker in areas because of less temporal accumulation. You can also see it in the eyes of characters. Also more noise in shadows on Switch 2. And of course a moderate reduction in geometric/mesh complexity on Switch 2. Otherwise they're pretty close. 

Obviously there are going to be some differences, the fact that the lighting engine is largely intact on the Switch 2 and has any ray tracing whatsoever is fucking bonkers on a portable 10-15 watt console in a big open world 9th gen game to begin with. 

I think honestly this puts to bed whether or not this is impressive hardware or not, this is very obviously already on the high end of what people were saying might be possible for this system, maybe even already beyond what a lot of people said was the roof and the system is only a few weeks old. 

I was actually one of a few who were expecting Switch 2 to have more examples of ray-tracing than Series S, when it became clear it had a T239. Switch 2 is roughly half as powerful as Series S for raster-loads (when docked), but unit per unit Ampere GPU's perform +30-50% compared to RDNA2 in RT workloads, and the more intensive the RT load the more that gap widens. Basically was expecting developers to go for a locked 30fps in games the Series S would target 60fps but with better RT effects, etc. But I also thought at the time it would have faster unified memory, more usable ram (only 1.5GB-2GB allocated to OS), and higher CPU clocks/more CPU cores than it does. 

But as far as I am aware, this game isn't using all of the T239's RT features anyway. Like ray reconstruction isn't used for example, and that can drastically improve quality with relatively minimal performance impact.